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Day: January 5, 2012

President Obama did what he had to do. Given the incessant withholding of his various cabinet appointees, by Republicans in the Senate, the POTUS has used his “recess appointment” ability to appoint four appointees to his cabinet. Bravo Mr. President!

Oh and by the way, the Right only screams when Obama does it. They never said a word when President George W. Bush did it.

Not long ago Newt Gingrich seemed to be a big fan of super PACs.The former House Speaker two years ago called the new legal framework that gave rise to unlimited fundraising by outside groups a “great victory for free speech” and predicted that the biggest of the recent federal court decisions deregulating campaign rules would make “it easier for middle-class candidates to compete against the wealthy and incumbents.”

Then he got a taste of the new rules in Iowa.

After weeks of withering attacks by a super PAC supporting his rival Mitt Romney, Gingrich won’t stop talking about the injustices of unchecked spending — specifically the $3 million spent attacking him. He even coined a name for it, saying he got “Romney-boated” by his chief opponent’s “millionaire friends.”

Of course, this really isn’t a case of flip-flopping: Gingrich continues to support the new campaign finance system, even though he’s whining about the way in which it is working. But given that nobody actually seems happy with what’s happened to campaign finance in the wake of Citizens United, wouldn’t it be nice if someone like Gingrich had the courage to step forward and admit he was wrong—and that a functioning democracy requires a campaign funding framework that not only allows all voices to be heard, but also holds politicians accountable for the messages they put on air—and who they ask to pay for them?

Oh, wait, there’s video of Mr. Santorum making “the” statement and we all know that this is the information age and everything is recorded in one way or the other. So, why would Mr. Santorum deny saying that he doesn’t want to give Black people other people’s money?

Santorum took heat after saying, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” During an appearance on FOX News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” he denied ever making the comments, saying the remark was the result of “a little bit of a blurred word.”

“I looked at that, and I didn’t say that,” Santorum told O’Reilly. “If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn’t.”

The GOP hopeful touted his past help of black colleges to further defend himself against criticism over the claims.

“And I can tell you, I don’t use — I don’t — first off, I don’t use the term ‘black’ very often. I use the term ‘African-American’ more than I use ‘black,” Santorum said. “I can tell you as someone who did more work for historically black colleges, I used to have — every year, I used to bring all the historically black colleges into Washington, DC to try to help them, because they get very little federal money through the bureaucracy, and so I help to try to introduce them to people in the Department of Education so they could have more resources.”

Santorum also got defensive over his presidential run less than a day after he took a close second place at the 2012 Iowa Caucuses, saying this campaign “isn’t my first rodeo.”

“I’ve been in a lot of tough campaigns in Pennsylvania,” Santorum said when asked if he is “ready to be demonized.”

“We’re going to have resources,” Santorum said. “We’re going to be a much bigger player than I think everybody anticipates right now.”

This is absurd. A 14 year old runaway deported because she had no ID and made up a name that just happened to be on the Immigration list of wanted non-documented persons. Lawrence O’Donnell breaks it down.